Thursday, May 29, 2014

From the maddeningly crammed streets and vulgar displays
along the Virginia Beach oceanfront, it’s only a 40-minute drive to the peaceful
and scenic Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Back Bay -- a 9,100-acre barrier island preserve of island marshes,
maritime forests and pristine beaches – was established by President Franklin
Roosevelt by proclamation in 1938 as a haven and breeding ground for migratory
birds and other wildlife.

More than 120,000
people visit the refuge every year, most to watch the 10,000 snow geese and
ducks that fly over Back Bay during the peak of the winter migration. Even in
the off season, though, there’s plenty to see. Herons and snowy egrets pose
majestically. Turtles sun themselves on log rivieras and snakes, naturally, slither.

On the Blue Goose Express, an open air tram, local history
buff Bob Baxter leads visitors back in time. A century ago, the area was dotted
with duck hunting lodges, visited by wealthy industrialists. Life-saving
stations every seven miles along the coast plucked unfortunate mariners from
the sea.

We take a short hike to historic Wash Woods in False Cape
State Park, which adjoins Back Bay. All that remains of the remote community of
farmers, fishermen and hunters and a church that seated 300 worshippers are the
steeple and about a dozen tombstones under whispering live oaks.

About 47 million people will flee urban noise and stress for
the tranquility of national refuges this year.

Visitors will savor birdsong and
unspoiled scenery; they’ll take pictures, swim and camp.

Few may think about how important presidents have been in
keeping our wild spaces in citizens’ hands.

Since Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing Yellowstone
as the first national park in 1872, presidents have played a crucial role in
conservation.

“I will do everything in my power to protect . . . great
natural beauties of this country,” vowed Theodore Roosevelt, who enjoyed being
president because he liked having “my hand on the lever.”

The 26th president set aside 230 million acres in
public land and created 150 national forests, 51 bird reserves, four national
game preserves, five national parks and 18 national monuments.

He left his successors the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives
the president or Congress the power to designate national monuments. The
president can act unilaterally.

He’s no TR, but Obama still could leave a conservation
legacy.

“I’ve preserved more than 3 million acres of public lands
for future generations. And I am not finished,”

Obama said May 21 when he used the
Antiquities Act to create the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument,
protecting half a million acres in New Mexico.

But the congressional resistance Obama faces extends even to
conservation. Dozens of bills that would protect lands and wildlife are stalled
in Congress.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed rules to
regulate oil and gas production on the national refuge system. Yes, more than 200 wildlife refuges have
existing oil and gas infrastructure and 100 have active oil and gas wells.

The government owns the land but not the oil and gas mineral
rights beneath the ground, and the government lacks the authority to regulate
private oil and gas development on the refuges. That’s why it has proposed
rules.

Two Louisiana Republicans on the committee blasted
Matson for his “emotional” testimony and for failing to credit the “innovative”
fixes.

Republicans also want to curb presidential power under the
Antiquities Act, which presidents of both parties have used. Obama has used the act 11 times, starting in November 2011 with
the Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton, Va.

The House voted in March to limit the president’s power to
designate monuments, requiring reviews under the National Environmental Policy
Act. The bill has little chance in the current Senate because the Democratic majority
is opposed.

When signing the order designating Organ Mountains a
national monument, Obama said he understands “our obligation to be good
stewards to the next generation – to make sure that our children’s children get
the same chance to experience all of these natural wonders.”

He needs to follow TR’s lead, keep his hand on the lever and
follow through on his conservation promises.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

For many of us, Memorial Day is a
long weekend of backyard barbecues and beach trips, the unofficial start of
summer fun.

But it wasn’t always so. Memorial
Day began as a spontaneous outpouring of grief after the ravages of the Civil
War.

At least 620,000 soldiers – about
2.5 percent of the population – perished in that war. Recent estimates put the
toll far higher – closer to 20 percent of the population. Nearly every family
lost someone. To cope with their sorrow, groups of women began visiting their
loved ones’ graves and decorating them with spring flowers.

The ritual, known as Decoration
Day, sprang up in the North and South. One of the first was in Columbus, Ga.,
in April 1866, when women visited a cemetery to put flowers on the graves of Confederate
soldiers who had died in the bloody battle of Shiloh four years earlier. Seeing
the neglected graves of Union soldiers, the women also placed flowers there.

In 1868, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan,
who led an organization of Union veterans, declared that Decoration Day should
be observed on May 30 with ceremonies and strewn flowers. It’s thought he chose
the date because flowers would be in bloom all over the country, according to a
Department of Veterans Affairs history.

By the end of the 19th
century, nearly every community dedicated May 30 to remember their Civil War
dead. After World War I, the commemoration was extended to honor all who died
in American wars.

How, you ask, did we go from
solemnly strewing flower petals to buying mattresses, appliances and big screen
TVs?

Thank -- or blame – the 1960s, Congress
and President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ signed the Uniform Holiday bill in 1968, and,
since 1971, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Washington’s birthday (now
Presidents Day) have been commemorated on Mondays.

“This will mean a great deal to
our families and our children,” LBJ said in a signing statement. “It will
enable families who live some distance apart to spend more time together.
Americans will be able to travel farther and see more of this beautiful land of
ours. They will be able to participate in a wide range of recreational and
cultural activities.”

He didn’t predict that the true
meaning of the holidays might get lost in traffic jams.

For years, the late Sen. Daniel
Inouye of Hawaii tried to restore the dignity of Memorial Day. Inouye, a
veteran who lost his right arm in combat in World War II, introduced a bill in
every Congress to move Memorial Day back to May 30.

“In our effort to accommodate
many Americans by making the last Monday in May Memorial Day, we have lost
sight of the significance of this day to our nation,” Inouye said in a speech
on the Senate floor in 1999. “Instead of using Memorial Day as a time to honor
and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many Americans use
the day as a celebration of the beginning of summer,” he said.

Inouye continued his valiant
effort until his death in 2012. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii has taken up
the quest, introducing the bill last year.

We don’t have to wait on
Washington to honor the fallen on Memorial Day. Many of the 131 national
cemeteries as well as state veterans cemeteries have ceremonies on or around
Memorial Day. To find one near you, check out the list on the VA's National Cemetery
Administration page.

At a time when the VA is
suffering from a health care scandal, here’s some good news. Veterans’ survivors
rank employees at the national cemeteries tops in customer service among all federal
agencies and major national corporations.

The
American Customer Satisfaction Index surveys people about their dealings with
government agencies and companies. Every three years, the survey asks about national cemeteries. In each of the last five surveys – 2001, 2004,
2007 and 2010 and 2013 – the cemeteries have received the top rating for
customer service in the public and private sectors.

National cemeteries are quiet,
green spaces that invite solemn reflection. Make time for a walk in history. Read
the names and dates on the white markers. Thank those who gave their all for us
and our freedom. Happy Memorial Day.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Twenty-five years ago, a rising star at Time magazine got on
a train in New York bound for Washington to hear one of his heroes give a
lecture.

How quaint, I hear you saying, with 21st century
impatience. Print. Train. Hero. Lecture. Ho hum.

Not so fast. The magazine man was Walter Isaacson, then 36,
who had been writing on a computer since the early 1980s, the only writer at
Time doing so. Apple’s Steve Jobs would later ask him to write his biography. But
I’m getting ahead of the story.

Isaacson’s hero was novelist Walker Percy, chosen to deliver
the 1989 Jefferson Lecture. Its sponsor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
says the lecture is “the highest honor the federal government confers for
distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Percy’s lecture on “The San Andreas Fault in the Modern
Mind” was one of his last public appearances. He died a year later at 74.

Isaacson had known “Uncle Walker” – actually the uncle of a
friend -- since his boyhood in New Orleans. Isaacson tried to figure out what
Percy did. He had trained as a doctor and people called him Dr. Percy, but he didn’t
practice medicine.

“He seemed to be at home most days, eating hog’s head cheese
and sipping bourbon,” said Isaacson, who was about 9 when Percy’s first novel, “The
Moviegoer,” appeared in 1961. That’s when Isaacson realized someone could make a
living as a writer the way others did as an engineer or a fisherman. “The Moviegoer” won the National Book Award,
and Percy kept writing.

Percy told him two types of people come out of Louisiana:
preachers and storytellers.

“For God’s sake, he said, be a storyteller. The world has
far too many preachers,” Isaacson recalled Monday night onstage at the Kennedy
Center where he delivered the 43rd Jefferson Lecture.

It’s heartening to know that the federal government still honors
intellectual achievement – and with an old-fashioned lecture and $10,000 prize.
It’s encouraging that the Concert Hall was nearly filled, although a reporter for
Inside Higher Ed observed that the audience may have been slightly smaller and grayer
than previously.

That’s not surprising. Filmmaker
Martin Scorsese was last year’s lecturer. Conservationist and author Wendell
Berry spoke in 2012, and Harvard president and Civil War historian Drew Gilpin
Faust was the speaker in 2011.

Isaacson, who turns 62 on May 20, is one of those achievers
who make even industrious bees feel like they’ve wasted too many hours flitting
around Facebook and the Food Channel.

A Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he was a
political reporter, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the
editor of Time. He then was chairman and CEO of CNN. He’s the author of
bestselling biographies on Jobs (2011), Albert Einstein (2007) and Benjamin
Franklin (2003), among others. He’s
president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies
institute based in Washington.

In January 1984, Jobs lugged an original Macintosh to Time
magazine to show it off. The editors called in Isaacson so they’d have one
person there who actually used a computer. The two men kept in touch and in
2003, after he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs asked Isaacson to write his biography.
He didn’t mention the diagnosis. Isaacson took the opportunity to tell Jobs’s
story.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid,
but I liked electronics,” Jobs told Isaacson.

“Then I read something that one
of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who
could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided
that’s what I wanted to do.”

The authorized
biography was rushed into print in 2011, days after Jobs died at 56.

Isaacson titled his lecture “The Intersection of the
Humanities and the Sciences.” Offering a rosy view of a digital future in which
human creativity fuses with technology, he acknowledged he was “singing to the
choir” about indispensible human imagination.

But he also challenged those who love the arts and
humanities to shake off their complacency about not knowing math or
appreciating science.

“Many people who extol the
arts and the humanities…will proclaim without shame (and perhaps even joke)
that they don’t understand math or physics. They would consider people who
don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be uncultured, yet they might merrily admit
that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome,” he said.

“Trust me, our patron Thomas Jefferson and his mentor
Benjamin Franklin would regard as a Philistine anyone who felt smug about not
understanding math or complacent about not appreciating science,” he said.

And so the storyteller preached on the need for math and
science in the digital age. My guess is that both Walker Percy and Steve Jobs would
have approved.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Imagine that you have a child with Down syndrome, and you
want your town to open a group home for children with the condition.

When you go to your town board to make your case, the
meeting starts with a Christian prayer. A minister stands at a lectern. facing
the small group of assembled citizens, and invites everyone to join in a prayer
to Jesus Christ, the savior of the world.

For more than a decade, residents of Greece, N.Y., a town of
94,000 near Rochester, faced such a situation whenever they had business with
their town board. Then, two women – one Jewish and one an atheist – complained
about the Christian prayers and filed a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

The women contended that the board’s practice of inviting
only Christian clergy to lead the opening prayer violated the First Amendment’s
Establishment Clause by preferring Christians over others and by sponsoring
sectarian prayer.

The practice was coercive because “it is impossible not to
participate without attracting attention to yourself, and moments later you
stand up to ask for a group home…having just, so far as you can tell, irritated
the people that you were trying to persuade,” Douglas Laycock, a University of
Virginia law professor, told the court in oral arguments last November.

On Monday, a majority of justices disagreed. The court ruled
5-4 in Town of Greece v. Galloway that the board could continue opening its meetings with Christian
prayers. The majority upheld the majority religion; the minority got short
shrift.

“Adults often
encounter speech they find disagreeable,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in
the majority opinion. People who “feel
excluded or disrespected” by the prayers should ignore them or leave the room, Kennedy
brusquely suggested. So much for walking
in someone else’s shoes.

Kennedy noted that all the clergy in the town directory from
which prayer-givers were chosen were Christians, reflecting the town. His
opinion was joined by the court’s four conservatives – Chief Justice John
Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito
Jr.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “I think the town of Greece’s prayer practices
violate the norm of religious equality – the breathtakingly generous
constitutional idea that our public institutions belong no less to the Buddhist
or Hindu than to the Methodist or Episcopalian.”

Kagan made clear she was not advocating a prayer- or religion-free
zone but the board had done nothing to recognize religious diversity. Until the lawsuit was filed, the “chaplain of
the month” was always a Christian.

“So month in and
month out for over a decade, prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed
toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and
distribute government benefits,” Kagan wrote. That practice “does not square
with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her
religion, owns an equal share in her government,” she said.

About three in four Americans approve of prayer at public
meetings as long as officials don’t favor one belief over another, a national
poll last December by Fairleigh Dickinson University found.

As with any case involving religion and government, reaction
on both sides was swift and strong.

“This is the first good thing the Supreme Court has done in
a long time,” declared Randall Wise, mayor of Niceville, Fla., where the city
council has been praying at meetings since before he became mayor 42 years ago.

Even if the court had ruled against the prayers, Niceville’s
city council would have kept praying, he insisted.

“We would have kept doing it until they stopped us with guns
or took us off to jail,” the mayor said, the Northwest Florida Daily News
reported.

But the red headline on the
website of Americans United for Separation of Church and State was unequivocal
in its opposition: “Supreme Mistake!”

Laycock, the University of Virginia law professor, told NPR
the ruling “is a green light for local majorities to impose their religious
practices on their fellow citizens.”

And that goes against the grain in our pluralistic society.

Kagan had it right. “When the citizens of this country
approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as members of one
faith or another,” she wrote.